I received the following rejection letter from an ePublisher to which I recently submitted my manuscript for Runaway Swimmer. It's very nice and gives great advice for improvements. Fortunately, I still have an agent looking at the manuscript and this looks promising, too.
She had a couple of grammatical flubs, but I'm disregarding them because she was so nice!
Dear Joshua,
Thank you for your submission. I am sorry to say that we will have to decline at this time. The premise of your story is intriguing and your descriptions are beautiful. There are a few challenges in it:
1. point of view moves disjointedly between John, Charles and author’s voice,
2. meandering story line — by this I mean the first four or five pages don’t seem to have a coherent line of thought. It seems to me that you have a lot you want to say and you feel you have to put it all in at once. You have done your research; now you want to show it without being so overt.
3. telling instead of showing in a number of sections
That being said, all of these can be fixed, if you so desire. I would suggest that you try to focus on one view point, perhaps John’s. You did this beautifully in the four sentences. The sentences was so vivid I could practically feel the sweat, I see the land, and I experience the love these two men have for the land. It’s when you move into the next sentence that the story starts to meander and the mood is lost. Try seeing this through John’s eyes, feeling what he is feeling. I believe you can. This snippets of brilliance show that you can. It just needs some polishing.Have you considered presenting it to a critique group? If you haven’t, you should consider it. Critters.org is good as are a number of other places.Should you decide to revise and rewrite, please inquire here again. I would like to see how this potentially gripping story evolves.
Good luck!
Best,
Name Deleted
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